Pining for More
The last brew went better, but left us wanting more. We were still pining for a darker, maltier beer with a full body like the ones commercial breweries made.
North Coast Brewing Company has made some of our favorite brews including Scrimshaw, Pranqster and Old Rasputin. AHS had a Red Seal kit, and this time we decided to take it up a notch. We decided to use EZ Water Calculator spreadsheet to adjust water chemistry and go all grain, which means we need to mash crushed grain for an hour before the boil.
We also decided to do a yeast starter. We added dry malt extract, water and nutrients to an Erlenmeyer flask and put it on a stir plate for 24 hours. We then cold crashed it so we could decant the liquid off and just use the yeast.
We learned a lot about how to vorlauf and sparge and it all went well for our first time. We also graduated to a 10 gallon MegaPot 1.2 kettle for about $150.00 so we can split the batch into kegs because screw bottling.
Then tragedy struck.
Some idiot (Randy) had the brilliant idea to put the hydrometer in the boiling wort only to watch it come apart and all of the beads, glass and wax end up at the bottom of the kettle full of precious wort. I could have died. The only thing that got me through it was this video:
